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Demis Hassabis<\/a>, CEO and one of three founders of Google\u2019s artificial intelligence (AI) subsidiary DeepMind, has been awarded<\/a> a knighthood in the U.K. for \u201cservices to artificial intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n Ian Hogarth<\/a>, chair of the U.K. government\u2019s recently launched\u00a0AI Safety Institute<\/a> and previously founder of music startup Songkick<\/a>, was awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for services to AI; as was Matt Clifford<\/a>, AI adviser to the U.K. government and co-founder of super-early-stage investor Entrepreneur First<\/a>.<\/p>\n Hassabis was born in London in 1976, emerging as a prodigy in a number of disciplines, and reaching master status<\/a> at chess by the time he was a teenager. He subsequently became lead programmer at fabled U.K. video game developer Bullfrog Productions<\/a>; graduated from the University of Cambridge with first-class honors in Computer Science; and worked in various AI and computer science roles before gaining a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from University College London (UCL).<\/p>\n Alongside Shane Legg<\/a> and Mustafa Suleyman<\/a>, who Microsoft hired from AI startup Inflection AI last week<\/a>, Hassabis founded DeepMind out of London in 2010.<\/p>\n Hassabis was awarded a CBE in 2017<\/a> for \u201cservices to science and technology\u201d in the wake of some high-profile achievements at DeepMind \u2014 this included developing an AI system that beat the world champion of strategy board game Go<\/a>. However, the company also courted controversy after signing data-sharing deals<\/a> with the U.K.\u2019s National Health Service (NHS). Fast-forward seven years, and it\u2019s telling that his knighthood was awarded specifically for services to \u201cartificial intelligence,\u201d a field that has catapulted into the mainstream consciousness over the past 18 months due to technologies such as OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT<\/a>.<\/p>\n The U.K. has been eager to position itself at the forefront of the AI revolution, driven by initiatives such as the AI Safety Summit which it hosted in England last November<\/a>. And it sits among the top-tier AI countries globally<\/a> in terms of R&D investment, behind the U.S. and China, with DeepMind serving as one of the U.K.\u2019s greatest AI exports. After snapping up DeepMind in 2014<\/a> for north of $500 million, it has emerged as one of Google\u2019s most critical assets, as the major technology companies battle it out for AI dominance \u2014 alongside Google Research, DeepMind is responsible for Gemini<\/a>, Google\u2019s rival to OpenAI\u2019s GPT-branded family of large language models.<\/p>\n So it does make sense that the U.K. would seek to honor one of its most high-profile AI figureheads. Other notable figures from the technology world to receive knighthoods include Apple\u2019s Jonathan \u201cJony\u201d Ive back in 2011<\/a>\u00a0for \u201cservices to design and enterprise.\u201d<\/p>\nProdigy<\/h2>\n